Hester and Harriet: Love, Lies and Linguine

Hester and Harriet are back and ready for more adventures!

The gentle humour and relaxed pace make this an enjoyable read. - Daily Mail



Hester and Harriet lead comfortable lives in a pretty cottage in an English village. Having opened their minds, home and hearts to Daria, a mysterious migrant, and her baby son Milo, the widowed sisters decide to further expand their own horizons by venturing forth to Italy for their annual holiday.



Back in England, Daria and Milo are celebrating - they've received official refugee status with papers to confirm they can make England their home. Meanwhile, nephew Ben, who knows only too well how much he owes his aunts, is hurtling towards a different sort of celebration - one he's trying to backpedal out of as fast as he possibly can.



With a huge secret hanging between the sisters, an unlikely new love on the landscape for Hester and new beginnings also beckoning for Harriet, Italy provides more opportunities for adventure than either of them could ever have imagined. But which ones will Hester and Harriet choose?



As Hester and Harriet throw all their cards on the table in Italy, and potential catastrophe threatens Ben in England, it's anyone's guess how chaos will be kept at bay.



Hilary Spiers has had a varied career - including law, speech therapy, teaching, youth work and the NHS. She has also been involved with the theatre as an actor, director and playwright, and her dramatic work has been performed in a number of theatres including Hampstead Theatre and Riverside Studios. Hilary has won several national short story competitions and had work broadcast on the radio. Hester and Harriet was her first novel.



It is a charming read, about normal people and the extraordinary things that happen to them at times, but also about life, and confronting things you don't necessarily want to confront.



The gentle humour and relaxed pace make this an enjoyable read.



A delightfully British story... An engaging read.



Spiers succeeds in her aim of "giving a voice to ordinary women in sometimes extraordinary circumstances".



Spiers has created a lovely holiday or weekend read here with smart, funny and quirky main characters who go on a journey of discovering things they didn't even realise were missing from their lives. This is an easy, entertaining read perfect for long summer days or that rainy Saturday afternoon.